Jul 02 2008
Water Boarding – Using Reflexive Responses To Instill Panic
Waterboarding is not ‘torture’ in my mind. Torture should define the inflicting of real injury. Thumbs screws, electrocution through car battery jumper cables, etc. Waterboarding actually taps into the body’s natural reflexive responses to drowning. Yes, it is horribly unnerving, as Christopher Hitchen’s just learned. No one likes to be helpless and controlled by others. But it is a practice that we use in our military training on our own. It has dangers (as does night time parachuting). But it does not cause permanent injury when done right, on healthy targets.
When 3,000+ lives may be on the line, I would say putting a known terrorist through some waterboarding is an unfortunate but humane option. I would not want to go through it, but then again I don’t plan to kill thousands of people.
You people are missing the forest through the trees. It is not simply an issue of whether or not waterboarding suspected terrorist is okay. It is a much broader issues as the recent documents the Senate Armed Services Committee obtain reveal.
The harsh interrogation techniques were not limited to waterboarding. The approved techniques included stress positions, exploitation of phobias, forced nudity, hooding, isolation, sensory deprivation, exposure to cold, use of dogs and sexual humiliation to name a few others. None of these techniques have previously been approved for use by the US military or interrogators. Not during WWII, the Cold War, Vietnam War, Korean War or the First Gulf War. And yet we somehow survived as a country – go figure.
The interrogation program was based on the U.S. military’s SERE training. You people fail to realize that this program is specifcially designed to train soldiers to deal with torture by an enemy that is willing to violate the Geneva Conventions. It is a program that is designed to simulate torture. These are the same techniques Bush and Co. approved for use on real prisoners.
All four branches of the military raised serious concerns about the legality of these techniques and were ignored. The FBI raised concerns about the effectiveness of these techniques and were ignored. This was not a case were the military and law enforcement agencies were all on board with these techniques.
Despite all your hypotheticals of a ticking bomb, that scenerio has never happened. You need to stop watching 24 and look at reality. These techniques were approved for use in general interrogation situations, not just the fantasy ticking bomb scenerio that you folks always use to justify torture.
You all act like there are no repercussions from using these techniques simply because terrorist would torture our soldiers. That is a overly simplistic and narrow view. Just look at the Abu Ghraib situation as one example. The release of those photos had huge repercussions on our country. It tarnished our reputation and severally hurt our international standing at a crucial time. It provided an enormous recruitment opportunity for terrorist. If it was no big deal why didn’t Bush simply respond to Abu Ghraib by saying so what? Because he knew it was a major problem for the US and he had to appear to be mortified by these actions.
That brings me to the last point, which people rarely bring up, that probably bothers me the most. We now know that the techniques the soldiers were using at Abu Ghraib were part of the approved program – forced nudity, humiliation, dogs, stress positions, water boarding – all of it. Bush and the military leadership knew that when the Abu Ghraib story came out. And yet they blamed it all on a bunch of rogue soldiers – bad apples – and sent them to prison. Keep in mind that the soldiers all claimed that they were merely following orders, but they couldn’t get access to the high-level documents proving that this was part of an approved program because it was top secret. How convenient. They sold our soldiers down the river to cover their own ass. And these are the people that you claim support our troops?
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2008/06/18/interrogation/index.html
conman,
The approved advanced interrogation techniques were approved for use on a handful of specific prisoners who were believed to have knowledge that could disrupt a plot and/or a cell of AlQueda. Nobody was waterboarded at Abu G.
They were never techniques approved for use on any general prison populations. It was for specific cases. That’s despite some of these techniques being common knowledge to anyone who has undergone advanced training in anything from survival to escape and evasion—including contractors.
I can also tell you for sure…these techniques are not new…and were most definitely used in WWII on up.
You are certainly entitled to your opinion about classifying any of these techniques as inhumane or even torture. But, the notion that all this stuff just started during the “war on terror” and was instituted widely into general populations is about as truthful as it is to say nobody ever put Saddam and WMD in the same sentence until Bush came along.